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THE 



RIV^L CL^IMAISTTS 



FOR 



NORTH ^IVIEIIIC^. 



1497-1755. 



JUSTIN WINSOR, 



From Procekdings of the American Antiquarian Society, at thf 
Annual Meeting, October 24, 1894. 



PRESS OF CHARLES HAMILTON 
311 MAIN STREET. 

1895. 



THE EIVAL CLAIMANTS FOE NOETH AMEEICA. 
1497-1755. 



In considering the respective claims of the English and 
French to North America, it must be remembered that the 
conflict of rights is not only one on identical lines arising 
from discovery, but one also on opposed lines arising from 
different conceptions of the rights of discovery. The claims 
are also represented by contrary methods and purposes in 
enforcing them. 

The French, in the time of Francis I. and later, claimed 
the new continent by reason of Verrazzano's voyage along 
its Atlantic coast. The claim, however, was not made 
good by permanent occupation anywhere along the sea- 
board of the present United States. 

Moreover, the English, under the Cabots, had sailed along 
this coast earlier. Still it was not till nearly a century 
had passed that the English government, urged by the 
spirit which Hakluyt and Dr. Dee were fostering, awoke to 
the opportunity and began seriously to base rights upon 
the Cabot voyages. The French at a later day sought to 
discredit this English claim, on the ground that the Cabots 
were private adventurers and could establish no national 
pretensions. The English pointedly replied that their 
Henry VII. had given them patents which reserved to the 
crown dominion over any lands which were discovered. This 
reply was triumphant so far as it went, but it still left the 
question aside, whether coast discovery carried rights to the 
interior, particularly if such inland regions drained to another 



sea. The English attempt in the latter part of the sixteenth 
century, under Raleigh's influence, to occupy Roanoke 
island and adjacent regions, but without detinite extension 
westward, was in due time followed by successive royal 
patents and charters, beginning in 1606 and ending in 1665, 
which appropriated the hospitable parts of the continent 
stretching from the Atlantic to the Pacific. For a north 
and south extension these grants almost exactly covered 
the whole length of the Mississippi, since the parallel of 
48°, which formed the northern limit, and that of 29°, 
which made the southern, were respectively a little north 
of the source of the great river and just seaward of its 
deltas. 

The charter of Acadia, granted by the French King three 
years before the first of the English grants, covered the 
coast from the 40° to the 46°, and was thus embraced in 
the pretensions of the English King, but his rival refrained 
from giving any westward extension, beyond what was 
implied in "the lands, shores, and countries of Acadia and 
other neighboring lands." 

It is interesting to determine what, during this period of 
sixty years, mainly in the first half of the seventeenth 
century, were the notions, shared by the English King and 
his advisers, of the extent of this munificent domain, with 
which he and they were so free. 

A few years before the first of these grants was made to 
the Plymouth Company, in 1606, Hakluyt had laid before 
the world, in Molineaux's great Mappe-Monde^ the ripest 
English ideas of the new world, and these gave a breadth 
to North America not much different from what it was in 
reality. The Pacific coast line, however, was not carried 
above Drake's New Albion, our modern upper California. 
This left the question still undetermined, if one could 
not travel on a higher parallel dry-shod to Asia, as 
Thomas Morton, later a settler on Boston Bay, imagined 
he could. 



Molineaux gives no conception of the physical distribu- 
tion of mountain and valley in this vast area, further than 
to bulk the great lakes into a single inland sea. The 
notion of an immense interior valley, corresponding in some 
extent to our Mississippi basin, which Mercator forty years 
before had divined, had not yet impressed the British mind. 
Mercator, indeed, had misconceived it, in that he 'joined 
the Mississippi and St. Lawrence basins together, by oblit- 
erating the divide between them. In this way he made his 
great continental river rise in Arizona and sweep north- 
east and join the great current speeding to the Gulf of St. 
Lawrence. Here, then, in the adequate breadth of the 
continent, as Mercator and Molineaux drew it, is conclusive 
evidence that the royal giver of these vast areas had, or 
could have had, something like a proper notion of the 
extent of his munificent gifts. At the date of the last of 
these charters, in 1665, Cartier and his successors had for a 
hundred and thirty years been endeavoring to measure the 
breadth of the continent by the way of the St. Lawrence 
and the great lakes. They sought to prove by inland 
routes whether the estimated longitude of New Albion had 
been accurate or not. There had, it is true, been some 
vacillation of belief meanwhile. One thing had been 
accomplished to clarify the notions respecting these great 
interior spaces. The bo^ief of Mercator had given way to 
the expectation of finding a large river, flowing in a south- 
erly direction, whose springs were separated from those of 
the St. Lawrence by a dividing ridge. It was not yet 
determined where the outlet of this great river was. Was 
it on the Atlantic side of Florida, as a long stretch up the 
coast from the peninsula was at that time called? Was it 
in the Gulf of Mexico, identifying it with the stream in 
which De Soto had been buried? Was it in the Gulf of 
California, making it an extension of the Colorado Kiver? 
Each of these views had its advocates among the French, 
who had already learned something of the upper reaches of 



both the Ohio and the Mississippi. It was left for Joliet and 
Marquette, a few years later, not to discover the Mississippi, 
but to reach the truth of its flow, and for La Salle to con- 
firm it. 

These latter explorations of the priest and trader gave 
the French such rights as came from traversing throughout 
the water-ways, which led with slight interruption from the 
water back of Newfoundland, to the Mexican gulf. In due 
time this immense valley of the Mississippi was entered 
by the British traders, as they discovered pass after pass 
through the mountain barrier, all the way from New York 
to Carolina. The French, indeed, had permanent settlements 
along the Illinois and on the lower Mississippi, but in 
other parts of the great valley, there is little doubt that 
wandering Britons were quite as familiar as the French 
trader or adventurer to the Indians. If the evidence is not 
to be disputed, there was among these hardy British adven- 
turers, a certain John Howard, who was, perhaps, the first, 
on the English part, to travel the whole course of one of 
the great ramifications of the valley. It was in 1742 that 
he passed from the upper waters of the James over the 
mountains to New River, by which he reached the Ohio. 
Descending this main affluent, he was floating down the 
Mississippi itself, when he was captured by some French 
and Indians and conveyed to New Orleans. An air of 
circumstantiality is given to the expedition in the journal 
of John Peter Salley, who was one of Howard's compan- 
ions. Fry, in his report to the Ohio Company at a later 
day, made something of this exploit as crediting the English 
with an early acquaintance with the great valley. The 
most western settlements of the Virginians are marked in 
Evans's map of 1755, as that of J. Keeney at the junction 
of Greenbriar and New River, and Stahl maker's house on the 
middle fork of the Holston River. These isolated outposts 
of the English were an exception to their habit of making 
one settlement support another. As set forth by Mitchell, 



the English alleged that the French planted their posts 
"straggling up and down in remote and uncultivated 
deserts in order thereby to seem to occupy a greater extent 
of territory, while in effect they hardly occupy any at all." 

The claims then of these rival contestants for the Trans- 
Alleghany region, as they respectively advanced them at 
the time, were thus put : 

The English pretended to have secured their rights by a 
westward extension, from the regions of their coast occu- 
pation, and down to 1763 they stubbornly maintained this 
claim, though forced to strengthen it, first, by alleging cer- 
tain sporadic, and sometimes doubtful and even disproved, 
wanderings of their people beyond the mountains ; and 
second, by deriving an additional advantage from professed 
rights ceded to them by the Iroquois. 

When the main grants to the Plymouth and London 
Companies were superseded by less extensive allotments, 
this same sea-to-sea extension was constantly reinforced as 
far as iteration could do it. The provincial charter of 
Massachusetts, for instance, in confirming the earlier bounds, 
carried her limits west towards the South sea. That of 
Virginia did the same, but with so clumsy a definition that 
the claims of Massachusetts and Virginia collided in the 
Ohio Valley and beyond. 

The Congress at Albany, in 1754, re-affirmed this west- 
ward extension, but allowed that it had been modified 
north of the St, Lawrence only by concession to Canada 
under the treaty of Utrecht in 1713. A similar ground 
was assumed by Shirley at Paris, in 1755, when he met the 
French Commissioners in an endeavor to reconcile their 
respective claims. 

The French, on the other hand, derived their rights, in 
their opinion, from having been the first to traverse the 
great valley, and because they had made settlements at a 
few points ; and still more because they possessed and had 
settled about the mouth of the great river. It was their 



contention, that such a possession of the mouth of a main 
stream, gave them jurisdiction over its entire watershed in 
the interior, just as their possession of the outlet of the St. 
Lawrence gave to France the control of its entire basin. 
Upon this principle, Louis XIV. had made his concession 
to Crozat for monopolizing the trade of the great valley. 

These two grounds of national rights, the one arising 
from the possession of the coast and the other from occupa- 
tion of a river-mouth, were consequently at variance with 
each other. They were both in themselves preposterous, 
in the opinions of adversaries, and both claimants were 
forced to abate their pretensions. The English eventually 
conceded to France all west of the Mississippi. France by 
the arbitrament of war yielded, to one people or another, 
the water-sheds of both the Mississippi and the St. Law- 
rence, just as the United States at a later day, making a 
like claim for the entire valley of the Columbia River 
through the discovery of its mouth, were forced to be con- 
tent with but a portion of their demand. 

There was another difference in the claims of the two 
contestants, which particularly affected their respective 
relations with the original occupants of the Great Valley. 

The French asserted possession against the heathen, but 
cared little for his territory except to preserve it for the fur 
trade. They were not, consequently, despoilers of the sav- 
ages' hunting-grounds. One to three square miles was esti- 
mated as each Indian's requirement for the chase. On the 
other hand, they seized such points as they wished, without 
thought of recompensing the savage owners. This preroga- 
tive of free appropriation, the French persistently guarded. 
When, in 1751, La Jonquiere told the tribes on the Ohio, 
that the French would not occupy their lands without their 
permission, he was rebuked by his home government and 
Duquesne, his successor, was enjoined to undo the impress- 
ion, which La Jonquiere had conveyed to the savages. 



9 

On the other hand, the English pioneers, by their char- 
ters and patents, got a jurisdiction over, but not a fee in, 
the lands conveyed. In the practice which England estab- 
lished, or professed to establish, occupation could only 
follow upon the extinguishment by purchase or treaty of 
the native title. 

Thus the Indian had exemplified to him by these intrud- 
ers two diverse policies. He was inclined to the French 
policy because it did not disturb his life, and drive him 
away from his ancestral hunting-grounds. Duquesne was 
wont to tell the Indians that the French placing a fort on 
the Indian's lands did not mean the felling of forest and 
planting of fields, as it did with the English ; but that the 
French fort became only a convenient hunting-lodge for the 
Indian, with undisturbed game about it. 

The Indian was inclined to the English policy because it 
showed a recognition of his right to the soil, for which he 
could get cloth and trinkets and rum, if he chose to sell it. 
But he soon found that the clothes which he obtained wore 
out, the liquor was gone, and the baubles were worthless. 
The transaction, forced upon him quite as often as volun- 
tarily assumed, was almost sure to leave him for a heritage 
a contiguous settlement of farmholders, who felled the 
forests and drove away his buffalo. 

The savage was naturally much perplexed between these 
rival methods, in determining which was more for his advan- 
tage. Accordingly, we find the aboriginal hordes over vast 
regions divided in allegiance, some preferring the French 
and others the English, and neither, by any means, constant 
to one side or the other. 

Moreover, these two diverse policies meant a good deal 
to such disputants in the trial of strength between them. 
The French knew they were greatly inferior in numbers, 
but they counted on a better organization, and a single 
responsible head which induced celerity of movement, and 



10 

this went a great way in overcoming their rival's weight of 
numbers. Joncaire boasted of this to Washington, when 
this Virginian messenger went to carry the warning of 
Dinwiddie. Pownall understood it, when he said that 
Canada did not consist of farms and settlements as the 
English colonies did, but of forts and soldiers. "The 
English cannot settle and fight too," he adds. "They can 
fight as well as the French, but they must give over 
settling." Thus the two peoples, seeking to make the 
new world tributary to the old, sought to help their rival 
claims by gaining over these native arbiters. It was soon 
seen that success for the one side or the other depended 
largely on holding the Indians fast in allegiance. 

The savage is always impressed by prowess. The French 
for many years claimed his admiration through their mili- 
tary success, and the English often lost it by lack of such 
success. In personal dealing with the savage, the French 
always had the advantage. They were better masters of 
wiles. They knew better how to mould the savage passions 
to their own purposes. With it all, they were always 
tactful, which the English were far from being. William 
Johnson, the astutest manager of the Indians which the 
English ever had, knew this thoroughly, and persistently 
tried to teach his countrymen the virtue of tact. It was 
not unrecognized among his contemporaries that Johnson's 
alliance with a sister of Brant, a Mohawk chief, had much 
to do with his influence among the six nations. 

"General Johnson's success," wrote Peter Fontaine, 
"was owing under God to his fidelity to the Indians and 
his generous conduct to his Indian wife, by whom he hath 
several hopeful sons, who are all war-captains, the bulwark 
with him of the Five Nations, and loyal subjects to their 
mother-country." This Huguenot, Fontaine, traced much 
of the misery of frontier life to the failure of the English 
to emulate the French in intermarrying with the natives, 
and he, curiously rather than accurately, refers the absence 



11 

of the custom to an early incident in Virginia history, 
"for when our wise politicians heard that Rolfe had married 
Pocahontas, it was deliberated in council whether he had 
not committed high treason by marrying an Indian prin- 
cess ; and had not some troubles intervened which put a 
stop to the inquiry, the poor man might have been hanged 
up for doing the most just, the most natural, the most 
generous and politic action that ever was done this side of 
the water. This put an effectual stop to all intermarriages 
afterwards." 

Both French and English were not slow in discovering 
that among the American tribes the Iroquois were the chief 
arbiters of savage destiny in North America. The struggle 
of each rival was to secure the help of these doughty con- 
federates. In the early years of the European occupation, 
the Dutch propitiated the Iroquois and the French pro- 
voked them. The English succeeded to the policy of the 
Hollanders, and the French long felt the enmity which 
Champlain had engendered. The Dutch and English could 
give more and better merchandise for a beaver skin, and 
this told in the rivalry, not only for the friendship of the Iro- 
quois, but for that of other and more distant tribes. This 
was a decided gain to the English and as decided a loss to 
the French, and no one knew it better than the losing party. 

Throuo:hout the loni*: strugiijle, the Enolish never ceased 
for any long period to keep substantial hold of the Iroquois. 
There were defections. Some portions of the Oneidas and 
Mohawks were gained by the Jesuits who settled their 
neophytes near Montreal. The Senecas were much inclined 
to be independent, and the French possession of Niagara 
and the arts of Joncaire helped their uncertainty. Every 
tribe of the United Council at Onondaga had times of inde- 
cision. B^it, on the whole, the English were conspicuously 
helped by the Iroquois allegiance, and they early used it to 
give new force to their claim for a westward extension. 



12 

The country which the Iroquois originally occupied was 
that portion of the State of New York south of its great 
lake, and their tribes were scattered through the valley of 
the Mohawk, along the water-shed of Ontario, and through- 
out the country holding the springs of the Susquehanna and 
the Alleghany. The Susquehanna had been from the days 
of John Smith an inviting entrance to the interior from the 
Chesapeake, and Champlain's deputy, in 1615, had found 
that it afforded a route to the sea from the Iroquois country. 

It was a dispute between the French and the English, 
which of the two peoples first penetrated this Iroquois 
country. La Jonquiere, in 1751, claimed the priority for 
the French. There can be little question, however, that 
whatever right followed upon priority belonged to the 
Dutch, and by inheritance to the English. This was always 
the claim at Albany, and when the French seized upon 
Niagara, the English pronounced it an encroachment upon 
the Iroquois country, as, indeed, Charlevoix acknowledged 
it was. At the same time the French contended that it was 
a part of the St. Lawrence valley, which was theirs by 
virtue of Cartier's and later discoveries. On this ground 
they also claimed the valley of Lake Champlain, and had 
advanced to Crown Point in occupying it, though the Iro- 
quois considered it within their bounds. 

So when the English seized Oswego it was in the French 
view an usurpation of their rights, "the most flagrant and 
most pernicious to Canada." This sweeping assertion, 
transformed to a direct statement, meant that the posses- 
sion of Oswego gave the English a superior hold on the 
Indians. It also offered them a chance to intercept the 
Indians in their trading journeys to Montreal. This ad- 
vantage was rendered greater by the English ability to give 
for two skins at Oswego as much as the French offered for 
ten at Niagara, De Lancey looked upon the Englj^h ability 
to do this as the strongest tie by which they retained the 
Indians in their alliance. "Oswego," said the French, 



13 

"gives us all the evils, without the advantages of war." 
Duquesne, in August, 1755, confessed that it was nothing 
but a lack of pretext, which prevented his attacking this 
English post. 

About the middle of the seventeenth century the Iroquois 
by conquests had pushed a sort of feudal sway far beyond 
their ancestral homes. They had destroyed the Hurons in 
the country west of the Ottawa. They had exterminated 
the Eries south of the lake of that name, and had pushed 
their conquests at least as far as the Scioto, and held in 
vassalage the tribes still farther west. They even at times 
kept their enemies in terror as far as the Mississippi. 
Somewhat in the same way they had caused their primacy 
to be felt along the Susquehanna. Their war parties were 
known to keep the fruitful region south of the Ohio in 
almost absolute desolation. 

The area included in these conquests is, perhaps, a mod- 
erate estimate of what the English meant by the Iroquois 
claim. As early as 1697, the Commissioners of Trade and 
Plantations, in formulating the English rights to sovereignty 
over the Iroquois, asserted something larger in saying that 
these confederates held "in tributary subjection all the 
neighboring Indians and went sometimes as far as the South 
Sea, the northwest passage and Florida, as well as over 
that part of the country now called Canada." Mitchell, in 
1755, claimed that by the conquest of the Shawnees in 
1672 the Iroquois acquired whatever title the original occu- 
piers of the Ohio valley had, and that their conquest of the 
Illinois carried their rights beyond the Mississippi. 

The English turned these Iroquois conquests to their 
advantage by assuming that the regions covered by this 
supremacy fell to their jurisdiction as one of the considera- 
tions of their alliance with the confederates. This preten- 
sion, in its most arrogant form, allowed there was no terri- 
tory not under Iroquois control east of the Mississippi, 



14 

unless it was the region of the south, where, with equal 
complacency, the English used their friendship with the 
Cherokees, Chickasaws and Creeks to cover all territory of 
the modern Gulf States, with a bordering region north of 
them. In Huske's English map of 1755, even this territory of 
the southern tribes is made tributary to the Iroquois, as well 
as all east of the Mississippi and the Illinois and Lake Michi- 
gan, and of a line thence to the upper waters of the Ottawa. 

In pushing their conquests to the Illinois, the Iroquois 
claimed, as Pownall tells us, that they warred upon these 
distant savages . because it was necessary to protect the 
beaver, which the Illinois were exterminating. There was 
little reason for so benign an excuse, for the ravages of the 
confederates were simply prompted by an inherent martial 
spirit. So distinguished a student of their career as Mr. 
Horatio Hale is inclined to give them a conspicuously 
beneficent character, which, however, hardly met the ap- 
proval of a more famous student, the late Francis Parkman. 

This Iroquois-English claim had distinguished advocates 
in Golden, Franklin and Pownall, but there was some 
abatement at times in its pretensions. Sir William John- 
son, in 1763, traced the line of this dependent country 
along the Blue Ridge, back of Virginia to the head of the 
Kentucky River, down that current to the Ohio above the 
falls ; thence to the south end of Lake Michigan ; along its 
eastern shore to Mackinac ; and northeast to the Ottawa 
and down that river to the St. Lawrence. The right of the 
Eno-lish kino; to such a territorv as this dated back, as the 
English claimed, to an alleged deed of sale in 1701, when 
the Iroquois ceded these hunting-grounds to English juris- 
diction, in addition to their ancestral lands. It was, as they 
claimed, a title in addition to that of their sea-to-sea char- 
ters. When the French cited the Treaty of Ryswick (1697) 
as giving them sway over the river basins where they held 
the mouths, and claimed this as paramount to any rights 
the Iroquois could bestow, the English fell back on these 



15 

territorial charters as the most ancient and valid claim of all. 

If the English charter claims were preposterous, this 
supplemental one was, in even some part of contemporary 
opinion, equally impudent and presumptuous. There was 
by no means an undivided sentiment among the colonists 
upon this point; and history has few more signal instances 
of tergiversation, than when, at a later day, the English 
government virtually acknowledged the justice of the 
French claim in urging the passage (1774) of the Quebec 
Bill. " We went to war," said Townshend, in the debates 
on this bill, " calling it Virginia, which you now claim as 
Canada." 

We read in Franklin's statement, in 1765, before the 
Stamp Act Committee, that the Virginia Assembly seriously 
questioned the right of the king to the territory in dispute. 
George Croghan, on the contrary, in a communication to 
Secretary Peters of Pennsylvania, wondered how any- 
body could doubt thtit the French on the Alleghany were 
encroaching upon the charter limits of Pennsylvania. 

The French were more unanimous in their view ; but it 
was only gradually that they worked up to a full"expression 
of it. Bellin, the map-maker for Charlevoix, had drawn in 
his early drafts the limits of New France more modestly 
than the French government grew to maintain, and he was 
soon instructed to fashion his maps to their largest claims. 
In like manner, the earliest English map-makers slowly 
came to the pitch of audacity which the politicians stood for, 
and Bollan, in 1748, complained that Popple (1732), Keith 
(1738), Oldmixon (1741), Moll, and Bowen (1747) had 
been recusant to English interests. It was not till Mitchell 
produced his map in 1755 that the ardentest claimant for 
English rights was satisfied. 

The instructions of Duquesne, in 1752, say that "'tis 
certain that the Iroquois have no rights on the Ohio, and 
the pretended rights through them of the English is a 



16 

chimera." In the negotiations of the Treaty of Utrecht, 
in 1713, the English had succeeded in getting an admission 
from the French which required all the resources of French 
diplomacy to qualify. This was an acknowledgment of 
the English sovereignty over the Iroquois. The French at 
a later day, when they felt better able to enforce their 
views, sniffed at the obligation and called the phrase " a 
simple enunciation" in words of no binding significance, — 
a summary way of looking at an obligation which could 
demolish any contract. When they condescended to ex- 
plain what they snifted at, they insisted that the Iroquois 
themselves never acknowledged such a subjection. Sir 
William Johnson was frank enough to call the connection 
of the English and Iroquois one of alliance rather than 
subjection. The French farther pointed out what was true, 
that the Iroquois did not always consider it necessary to 
consult the English when making treaties or declaring war. 
Again, when forced to other explanations, the French main- 
tained that the subjection of the Iroquois in their persons 
did not carry sovereignty over their lands. If it did, they 
said, the Iroquois who occupy lands at Caughnawaga, would 
be equally subject in land and person, and that would in- 
volve the absurdity of yielding to the English jurisdiction 
territory at the very gates of Montreal. 

There was another clause in this treaty of Utrecht which 
the French were hard put to interpret to their advantage. 
This was the clause by which the French acknowledged the 
English right to trade with all Indians. The minutes of in- 
struction given to Duquesne, show how this was interpreted. 
"The English may pretend that we are bound by the Treaty 
of Utrecht to permit the Indians to trade with them ; but it 
is sure that nothing can oblige us to allow this trade on our 
own lands." This, in the light of the French claim to the 
water-sheds of the St. Lawrence and the Mississippi, would 
debar the English from trading at Oswego, and on the Ohio. 



17 

The English had, in 1726, by a treaty made on Septem- 
ber 14, and which Governor Pownall prints in his Admin- 
islration of the Colonies, secured a fresh recognition by the 
Iroquois of their guardianship over them. By this compact 
the Senecas, Cayugas and Onondagas, falling in with the 
concessions of the Mohawks and Oneidas in 1684, surren- 
dered a tract from Oswego to Cayahoga (Cleveland), with 
an extent inland of sixty miles. 

A score of years and more passed thereafter before the 
French became fully sensible that the}^ must forcibly con- 
test their claim to the Ohio. By this time their plan had 
fully ripened of connecting Canada and Louisiana by a 
chain of posts, and of keeping the English on the seaward 
side of the AUeghanies. In this, they were convinced, 
lay a riper future for New France rather than in crossing 
the Mississippi and disputing sovereignty with the Spaniard. 
This accomplished, they hoped to offer a barrier against the 
English eftective enough to prevent their wresting from 
Spain the silver mines beyond the Mississippi. 

The French had always claimed priority on the Ohio, and 
when Celoron was sent in 1749 to take formal possession 
along its banks, by hanging royal insignia on trees and 
burying graven plates in the soil, that officer professedly 
made " a renewal of possession of the Ohio and all its afflu- 
ents," — a possession originally established " by arms and 
treaties, particularly those of Ryswick, Utrecht and Aix-la- 
Chapelle." There was urgency for such a "renewal," for 
Celoron found that the English were already in possession 
of the country, so fiir as the friendly sanction of the natives 
signified it. Thus the Iroquois claim to that extent had 
proved efiective, and Colden has distinctly expounded it in 
his History of the Five JS/'ations. It was also clearly traced 
in maps by Jefferys in 1753, and by Mitchell and Huske 
in 1755. 

It was, therefore, a necessity for the French to use force 
if they were to make good their claims by holding the 



18 

valley. Accordingly, we find in 1751, La Jonquiere 
instructed "to drive from the Beautiful River (Ohio) any 
European foreigners, and in a manner of expulsion which 
should make them lose all taste for trying to return." 
With the usual French diplomatic reservation, that gov- 
ernor was further enjoined "to observe notwithstanding 
the cautions practicable in such matters." 

There is a M/^moire of 1751 which sets forth the French 
anxiety lest the English, by securing a post on the Ohio, 
should be able to keep the Indians in alienation from the 
French. Such English success would mean a danger to 
French communications with the settlers on the Mississippi, 
who stood in particular need of Canadian assistance in the 
war which was waged against them by the Carolina Indians, 
instigated by the English there. Without such a bar to 
their progress, as the French possession of the Ohio, the 
English could easily advance, not only upon the French 
posts among the Illinois, but they could endanger the port- 
age of the Miami, which was the best route from Canada, 
and which if lost might involve the abandonment of Detroit. 

The conclusion of this complaint is two-fold : Detroit must 
be strengthened by a farming population about it for its sup- 
port in order to preserve it as the best place to overawe the 
continent. The Illinois country must be protected ; its buf- 
falo trade fostered ; that animal's wool made marketable ; 
and the custom of salting its flesh prevail so that the neces- 
sity of depending on Martinico for meat be avoided. 

The movement of the French on the Alleghany in 1754 
had put an end to temporizing. Albemarle, who was Eng- 
land's ambassador at Paris, was a butterfly and a reprobate, 
and he was little calculated to mend matters, now easily 
slipping from bad to worse. 

A tough and sturdy young Yankee, then keeping school 
in Worcester, Mass., John Adams by name, represented 
the i-ising impatience of the colonists, who had not forgotten 
their yeoman service at Louisburg. He looked forward to 



19 

the complete expulsion of "the turbulent Galllcks!" 
The year 1755 opened with events moving rapidly. In 
January, France proposed to leave matters as they were 
and let commissioners settle the dispute in details. Eng- 
land in response fell back on the treaty of Utrecht. In 
February, France proposed as a substitute that all east of 
the mountains should belong to England, and all west of 
the Alleghany River and north of the Ohio should fall to 
France. This left as neutral territory the slope from the 
mountains to the Alleghany and the region south of the 
Ohio. In March, England assented to this, provided the 
French would destroy their posts on the Alleghany and 
Ohio. This would make a break in the French cordon 
connecting Canada with the Mississippi, and would give 
the Eno;lish an advantagfe in the control of the neutral 
country. So France refused the terms. In June, England 
again resorted to the conditions of Utrecht, and insisted on 
the validity of the Iroquois claim. France reiterated her 
denial of such a claim, as regards the territory, but acknowl- 
edged it as regards the persons of the confederates. Eng- 
land insisted, as well she might, that this was not the inter- 
pretation put upon similar provisions in other treaties. 
England now reminded Braddock of this provision in the 
treaty of 1726, and instructed him to act accordingly. 
This brought the business to the pitch of war, though both 
sides hesitated to make a declaration. Galissonniere claimed 
it to be the testimony of all maps that France was right in 
her claim, and her possession of what she strove for was 
now to be settled by sterner evidence. 

Danville and the other French map-makers had been 
brought to representations that kept Galissonniere's state- 
ment true. The English cartographers had done equally 
well for their side, and Mitchell could be cited to advantage. 
His Map of the British and French Dominions in North 
America was based on documents which the English Board 
of Trade thought best enforced their claim, and the 



20 

publication, when made, in 1755, was dedicated to their 
secretary. In an accompanying text the English claim was 
pushed to its utmost, and every old story was revamped 
which served to bolster pretensions of the English preced- 
ing the French in exploring the country, reviving the anti- 
quated boast that New Englanders had even preceded the 
French in crossing the Mississippi, and had really furn- 
ished the guides for La Salle's discoveries. 

Perhaps the best knowledge which was attainable at the 
time, of the valley of the Ohio, had been reached by 
Christopher Gist, who, in his wandering, had corrected the 
supposed curves and trends of that river. Lewis Evans, 
in June, 1750, made his proposals to visit and map the 
country under disguise as a trader, and in the pay of the 
province of Pennsylvania. His map of the BritisJi Middle 
Colonies was published at Philadelphia just in time to be 
of use to Braddock. Washington later said of it that, 
"considering the early period, it was done with amazing 
exactness." The Governor of Pennsylvania was satisfied 
that Evans had mapped the Alleghanies correctly, and 
contended that this new draft showed how much would be 
lost if the English made these mountains their bounds. 

Of the country in dispute Evans's map in one of its 
legends represents: "Were nothing at stake," it reads, 
"between the crown of Great Britain and France but the 
lands in the Ohio, we may reckon it as great a prize as has 
ever been contended for between two nations, for this coun- 
try is of that vast extent westward as to exceed in good land 
all the European dominions of Great Britain, France and 
Spain, and which are almost destitute of inhabitants. It is 
impossible to conceive, had His Majesty been made ac- 
quainted with its value and great importance, and the huge 
strides the French have been making for several years past 
in their encroachments on his dominions, that His Majesty 
would sacrifice one of the best gems in his crown to their 
usurpation and boundless ambition." 



21 

The opinion of James Maury that whoever was left at 
the end of the war in the possession of the lakes and the 
Ohio would control the continent, was not, at this time, an 
unfamiliar one in the public mind. It was, moreover, not 
unconnected with the belief that in the time to come, a 
route west by the Hudson or the Potomac, connecting with 
these vaster water-ways of the interior, would make some 
point on the Atlantic coast "the grand emporium of all 
East Indian commodities." We have lived to see the 
prophecy verified, but by other agencies. 



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